“Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. The truth is too complex and frightening.”
Martin Buber, I and Thou
In an ideal world, two words—violence and ideals—shouldn’t land anywhere near one another, but a teacher of mine, Frank Osteseski, author of The Five Invitations: What Death Can Teach Us About Living More Fully, brought the paradox to my attention during a dharma talk some years back. It was a gut punch I’ve never forgotten. I don’t remember the specific context of that talk, but having taught for decades, he must have watched how his students weaponized ideals against themselves. Being good Buddhists, they probably tried to restrain themselves from using ideals in judging others, but it’s a carte blanche on ourselves. Who would know except for what is revealed behind closed doors with our teachers and therapists?
Despite how we may appear in our social media, we Americans are experts at secretive self-flagellation. Decades ago, a group of Buddhist teachers from the West gathered at the feet of the Dalai Lama and tried to explain the lack of “self-esteem” rife among their students: apparently, the phenomenon made no sense to him at all and it had to be explained over and over. Buddhist Psychologist Tara Brach, says that many of us live continually under a “trance of unworthiness,” so there’s value in unpuzzling and perhaps UnStorying the fuel. Although I now know better than to believe my internal stories of unworthiness spawned by unachievable ideals, when that hypnotic stupor finds me, the volume happily increases to grab center stage until I intentionally stop it.
All of us want to be happy, and (almost) all of us want to be known as kind, generous, and good. Not feeling like a “good person” hurts. Although there’s been a slight drop in US suicide rates in the last few years, according to the CDC, overall suicide rates from 2010 to 2020 increased by 30%. No single idea or approach can lasso and uproot such a deep part of our psyche. Perhaps UnStorying in this instance means not so much to transcend words, but to complicate a single narrative about cause and effect to unmask the full extent of our confusion and sloppy and damaging mental fabrication.
Photo by Ante Hamersmit
Some ideas towards complicating the narrative of unworthiness: Self-flagellation harkens back to the country’s puritanical heritage (still?!). Has Original Sin taken on a new guise as White Guilt for slavery and continued racism? It probably should, but how, in practical ways, do we begin reparation? Matthew Desmond, in his book Poverty by America, argues that capitalism’s visible brutality on the poor inescapably poisons the virtue and psyche of the rich. And yet another layer: Consumer culture in which we’re never quite healthy enough, wealthy enough, slim enough, smart enough, happy enough. Comparisons are ubiquitous. Is “Never-enough” the lingua franca of global capitalism? All these aspects of society feel so big, so endemic, we don’t know how or where to begin to redress them. I find myself defaulting back to the personal level.
Not long ago, I encountered a former high school student of mine working as a barista. While he made my latte, he whined, “Mrs. Conover! This adult thing is not what you all cracked it up to be!“ I laughed, but he was right. We aren’t honest with one another as adults or with our children. The poet Maggie Smith said it directly in her poem, “Good Bones”: The world is at least/fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative/estimate, though I keep this from my children.” With so many self-help tools and therapies at our disposal to try and make life conform to our ideals—whose fault could falling short of them be but our own?
My current wondering has another suspect arena: radical individualism versus the fundamental need for belonging. We want to be seen as special, as unique individuals, but we also want to belong, so we story the way we should be according to our ideals and find the people who hold the same values. Although this approach seems natural, it will always reject a great portion of humanity, including ourselves. The writer Mary Pipher says that the most important thing for any American to do is to slow down and talk to one another.
Perfectionism is where idealism finds its softest target in me. I’ve let perfectionism invade arenas too numerous to name–from my plans for the day, to what I said to another person that might have offended, to the big-brush life reckonings. And what is the engine behind perfectionism but a relentless micro and macro horizon of ideals? Elizabeth Gilbert in an interview with Kate Bowler on the podcast, Everything Happens, says, “Let’s call perfectionism for what it is: terror.” There it is again—the harshness of ideals—the need to belong and the fear of not belonging by not measuring up moment by moment, day by day. It’s an exhausting, losing, battle for control.
An ideal is a decision or assumption of how things should be. More than six decades into this life, I’m finally starting to notice: life seldom conforms. “Nothing, not one thing, hurts us more—or causes us to hurt others more—than our certainties,” says Maria Popova in The Marginalia. Maybe we can UnStory these certainties, attuning to our heart’s inclinations, and looking to use the qualities of our ideals for navigation in life’s seas instead of a sink-or-swim metric.
Try this on: Maybe all the scrambling towards our ideals is just another face of love—the wanting to belong and not knowing how to other than by being something better, something more. We can forgive ourselves for that: the need to love and be loved.
For an UnStory Corps essay, this has been a lot of words! Here’s a single word: ease. Can we hold ease—the slowing down and the connecting—as a quality to cultivate? The word has a built-in resistance to being idealized. I know when I’m clenching to an ideal because it feels, well, a lot like clenching. Not only does my body constrict, but my mind as well: curiosity flees, and my vision of life and joy flatlines. Ease has broad existential ramifications as well as an almost instantaneous somatic release. The untangling of the cage of how things should be, how others should be, how we should be. Ease is a quality that can UnStory both the body and the mind of ideals. My friend, Henrik, signs off his emails like this: Everybody! Calm down! It makes me smile.